I made a movie called Point Man and it finally released today

Recommended Posts

After three years of constant work, four threads on the huddle, two huddlers cast in roles, and wearing on everyone else's nerves talking about it, I can finally announce that Point Man is complete and has been launched in the U.S. and Canada. As of this morning it's available for streaming on Amazon and iTunes and it's stocked at every Walmart in the nation. I waltzed my happy ass in the morning to buy my own copy and stood there with goosebumps staring at it for a solid five minutes.

This thing has the Huddle's fingerprints written all over it. Many years ago I posted my travel photos here and @Jeremy Igo told me I had an eye for photography - the first time a professional had told me such a thing. It gave me the confidence to pursue something visual of this nature. Ditto the shot at writing articles for the site in 2015. I learned people liked my writing and maybe I could do something big with it.

When I started Point Man it was just a backyard summer project. I was going to shoot it in North Carolina and enter it in a couple of festivals. The fundraising went far better than expected and changed all that. Kind folks like @RoaringRiot, @cookinwithgas, @ARSEN, @Chaos, @Cary Kollins, and @Captroop selflessly donated to the upstart campaign. It was all enough to rent a Huey helicopter for our first production dates, which gave us the production value boost needed to get investors on board. @Paa Langfart kindly milled a prop for us. Casting gave us Charlotte native and Panthers fan Chris Long in the lead role, and the Huddle's own @OneBadCat in a supporting role, with @Moorgan and a number of others joining us on set in background roles.

Investment dollars gave us a shot at making a film that could get distribution and reach the world. On an unbelievably small budget we moved principle photography to Cambodia, providing us a world-class shooting location with unmistakably Southeast Asian topography as the backdrop for our film. We filmed over half the movie there, and later in the year ducked across the border and officially became the first original narrative Vietnam War film in American cinematic history to shoot on location in Vietnam. Big deal for a little shitcan production and a rookie director.

We returned home to film domestically. @arbnranger set us up with some studio housing for a scene. @KJ89 did all our background photography and got us the shots needed for Sony to do our film poster. Speaking of Sony... last summer we inked a contract with Sony Entertainment and Vision Films to represent Point Man as our global distributor. They made some edits and we kicked off our world tour: a premiere back in Phnom Penh, a cast-and-crew premiere in Greensboro ( @Cat, @Johnny Rockets, @Floppin, @cookinwithgas, and others attended) and an award-winning circuit in Australia. We closed it out at the Academy Award qualifying St. Louis Int'l Film Festival last year and buckled in for the release.

And that day is today.

Point Man showing up in fuggin Walmart is an inextricable product of the kindness of the Huddle community, many of them strangers to me before this unexpected and incredible journey began. I am grateful to be able to present it here now and finally stop making these goddamn Point Man threads. Thanks to everyone who was a part of all this - you have my undying gratitude.

And I'm only half joking by invoking the names of some of the worst filmmakers of all time (or best, depending on your point of view). Because at the end of the day, they - and now our very own Philly B - were faced the unfathomable complexity, the seemingly insurmountable difficulty, endless strain and stress, pain and heartbreak, anguish, overwhelming hopelessness and sheer fugging joy it takes to get a movie made and distributed. And they fugging did it!

Haters take note; what the fug have you done?

Phil, congratulations! You're the envy of oh so many, myself included. And you should be proud every day of what you accomplished.

And I'm only half joking by invoking the names of some of the worst filmmakers of all time (or best, depending on your point of view). Because at the end of the day, they - and now our very own Philly B - were faced the unfathomable complexity, the seemingly insurmountable difficulty, endless strain and stress, pain and heartbreak, anguish, overwhelming hopelessness and sheer fugging joy it takes to get a movie made and distributed. And they fugging did it!

Haters take note; what the fug have you done?

Phil, congratulations! You're the envy of oh so many, myself included. And you should be proud every day of what you accomplished.

all undeserved superlatives aside (i truly have accomplished nothing yet) i am absolutely amazed that we did actually make it this far. i am as unqualified for this as anyone ever has been for everything. i had never made a film before in my entire life, not even a short film. jumping into a feature is unheard of. getting distribution on a first feature is unheard of. we had a one in a million chance (probably literally) of this thing being a success and somehow hit those odds to get here.

i still remember my first day on set. everything had been a series of successes up to that point, from getting 4000+ people to submit to the auditions to arranging the logistics to shoot with the helicopter. nothing but affirmation. then i stepped up with the film slate, everything on set, actors decked out, everyone sitting in the chopper... and realized i had no fuging clue how to call the slate. i didn't know the nomenclature, command order, buttfuging nothing. i had about a three-second existential implosion internally, wondering what the fuging fug i had just gotten myself into, then took a deep breath and improvised.

the key to overcoming imposter syndrome is realizing everyone else has it too.

4

Share this post

Link to post

Share on other sites

for those of you kind enough to stream it on amazon: if you enjoy it, would you be so kind as to leave a brief written review when you're done? this helps enormously with amazon rankings in our effort to top the new release charts and pick up as much exposure as possible.